WELCOME TO THE MULTI-GENRE SCIENCE CORNER

“Science is the poetry of reality.” — Carl Sagan

Ever since a friend’s father told us when we were ten that he’d had an encounter with a UFO while on a trip to Arizona – I’ve been hooked!

Here is some of the latest and greatest news on the always fascinating topic: Are we alone?…

https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/14/world/ufos-search-for-alien-life-scn/index.html

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/truth-embargo-ufos-are-suddenly-all-talk-washington-n1270560

https://theconversation.com/do-aliens-exist-we-asked-five-experts-161811

More than 30 people saw the same UFO in Argentina: The Unexplained Files:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPZPu_ecNvE

(Re)surface

Artist: Lauren Skelly Bailey

Music Stuff

An Interview with Gerald Busby

We have the great pleasure of presenting a (Re) “I have a few questions,” interview with music composer, Gerald Busby, whose work includes composing the powerful score for Robert Altman’s 1977 film, Three Women.

I presented Gerald with four questions which I asked him to answer in written form, in whatever way he chose. Here are his inspiring responses. 

Let’s begin at the beginning. Tell us a bit about your music background?

I was born into a Southern Baptist family at the peak of both the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, December 16, 1935, in Abilene, Texas. Just the opposite of the families depicted in The Grapes of Wrath: my parents moved east, with me as a three-year-old and my sister, from the dreaded barren plains of West Texas, to the small town of Tyler, Texas, a hundred miles from Louisiana. There they promptly joined the First Baptist Church, and its myriad of activities comprised my family’s entire social environment. Every event at the church began with singing, and from the age of 10, I was regularly called on to play the piano for these meetings. Nothing was more important to my development as a public performer — I had a consistent audience in the singing congregation itself. 

I learned to play the giant rosewood Crown Upright Parlor Grand Piano that sat in our living room. It had been a wedding gift to my mother in 1917, and had been purchased by mail from the Sears Roebuck Catalogue.

I began taking piano lessons and learned Bach and Chopin along with Baptist hymns. I won student competitions and appeared as soloist at the age of 15 with the East Texas Regional Symphony Orchestra playing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in C-Minor. Two years later I performed the same piece with the Houston Symphony Orchestra at one of their summer concerts.

But it was my continuing performances at church as accompanist to hymn-singing that really informed and propelled my career as a creative musician. A traveling evangelist named Angel Martinez came for a two-week revival meeting at the First Baptist Church. I was asked to be the pianist for revival services. Reverend Martinez was impressed by my abilities, particularly the piano solos I frequently played during the services before the sermon began. It was my virtuoso hymn arrangements that got the congregation in the mood to absorb his words of salvation. He hired me on the spot to travel with him on his summer tour that included engagements in Alabama and Oklahoma.

The revivals took place in high school football stadiums where the congregation sat on the bleachers and we, the preacher and musicians, led the proceedings from wooden platforms built on the track just in front of the bleachers. Crowds of up to 3,000 worshippers sat for three hours to be inspired by the music and the words of the gospel. No training could have been better for me in preparation for learning how to keep the show moving with the music, and learning to write music that touched people emotionally. Our goals were twofold: to get the audience to give us money and to give their hearts to Jesus. I was learning to write movie music.

How Does One Approach Scoring a Film?

Scoring a film is for me exactly like setting a poem to music: you write music that makes the passing images flow emotionally from one to the next, just as songs make words flow from one to the next. You’re creating an emotional context for the images to inhabit and travel through.

This process is governed by intuition, not thought. The choice of musical instruments is primary in creating the mood and progress of the context. The actual musical sounds delineate the boundaries and nature of the emotional range. And, I feel, the classical structures, namely sequence and cadence, determine the sense of completion or satisfaction.

http://wavetheoryrecords.com/soundtrack/3-women-original-motion-picture-soundtrack-by-gerald-busby/

What was it like working with Director, Robert Altman?

Working with Altman was like losing yourself completely, only to find yourself already complete. My relationship with him transcended words. Everything about him seemed to emanate from energy and intent. He had the ability to disappear in a room full of people, something I came to regard as a total absence of ego. He knew how to be himself completely within any situation, not needing or lacking anything that words could contribute or influence. He was Zen-like, particularly in the way he chose me as his composer for 3 Women. A friend of mine who knew Altman’s publicist, Mike Kaplan, had sent a cassette of my music containing a solo flute piece called “Noumena.”

As Altman later told me, he was looking for abstract music that none of his friends and colleagues would ever choose to listen to. He liked my music and that of two other composers, so one afternoon in his office, he invited all his staff (he was then making three films a year) and friends, Peter Boyle and Lilly Tomlin, to smoke grass and drink Scotch. When everyone was a bit high and chattering away, he raised his voice to tell them he wanted them to listen to three pieces of music. That’s all he said. Then he had his audio engineer play each of the tapes, and he stood in a corner with a stopwatch to determine exactly how much time elapsed from the second each tape began until someone in the group spoke. In Zen-like fashion he knew that if they talked, no matter what they said, they had stopped listening. He just wanted to know how long the sound of this music, which none of them knew or liked, would hold their attention. It turned out that my music lasted the longest in unspoken silence, so that alone determined Altman’s decision.

What Are You Up To Now?

As the result of a recent near-death experience of undergoing major surgery at the age of 85, my time spent at the computer creating musical sounds is devoted almost exclusively to exploring orchestral textures, and with these textures I seek to capture the flow of emotion in its most organic, non-specific forms. I’m influenced by the Buddhistic notion of emotion as a natural phenomenon that has no intrinsic meaning. In its most natural form, emotion simply flows without purpose or significance. To identify emotion in this state is in fact to give it meaning. I want to write music that does exactly that, that leaves the meaning entirely up to the listener.

Here is one of Gerald’s latest compositions: Suite No. 2 for Strings

Thank you Gerald, for your invaluable contribution to the world of music and film! We look forward to hearing more of your wonderful compositions.